The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book doesn’t stand the test of time well, but it’s interesting and entertaining. It also made me think about the principle of Christian celibacy in a different way.

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Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy

Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is about that thing that happens to most married people: first the passionate love, then an emotional bump in the road, and then a life-long truce. It doesn't happen to everyone, though many people can't avoid it.

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Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some amazing sentences and insights into humans, but the actual story is so sad and dispiriting and kind of “blehhh.”

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Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is more about how the older generation and the younger generation view each than specifically on the internal personal relationship between fathers and sons (though there is some of the latter). It's also about how romanticism and rationalism alternate in importance throughout generations, though the way Turgenev wrote he seems to have a distinct preference for romanticism and a bit of an unfair categorization of rationalism-- also, why do they need to be mutually exclusive. I really like the complete mess of a character of Bazarov and his growth in some things, and also his lack of growth in other things, throughout the novel.

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The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov

The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There are many bits of truth in this story and lots of good sentences, but to my experience, this story seems to misunderstand real love.

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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is wonderful. Tolstoy captures every important human feeling, thought, and relationship in a way that I doubt could be surpassed. He tackles birth, death, and the meaning of life with his genius of perception and communication.

It’s a long book and dragged a bit in the sections on Levin’s farming or political debates and observations. But even these sections contribute to a more complete sense of the historical context and life of the characters. Additionally, Tolstoy seemed to understand the concept of mindfulness and flow and explained it in the mowing section pretty well.

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The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol

The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bureaucracy in society = loss of humanity. I agree 100%.

My mother died this year, and my father already died 7 years ago. Do I get to mourn my mother and my complete loss of parents at my leisure? No. Everything related to dealing with my mother’s death is a nightmare. Most recently I’m fighting with Cobra because they put in their system that she died a month before she did, even though they had a death certificate that says the correct date and they know it is their error. I expect that this error will cascade into many more errors as I get rejected payments for her end of life care. This is just one of many problems I've encountered with the bureaucracy of death.

Additionally, I got an incorrect tax bill this year because my former boss filed his end of the taxes incorrectly. I have to jump through several hoops to correct errors other people made. This began while my mother was literally on her deathbed and has still not been resolved. Being powerless against the machinery of the IRS has a special irony this year, in this the year of President Trump.

Do I want to come back after my death and haunt all these institutions, customer service representatives, politicians that do nothing to regulate this, and society in general? You bet I do.

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A Confession by Leo Tolstoy

A Confession by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tolstoy trying to figure out the meaning of life. Remarkably similar to my own experiences except I never got to be a successful sinful writer. Haha. I don't feel terribly satisfied with the end of his essay or my (same) current status. Hopefully, there's some step after this.

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The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The most important, most true, most amazing thing I have ever read. I wish I had read it sooner and often.

Death is one of the most important things humans must confront, but most of don't until and unless we must. Instead, we are caught by surprise. When I had to confront it the first time, I couldn't believe how unprepared our society had left me. There is a lot of information that would make us able to handle it with more grace and less pain. The Death of Ivan Ilych perfectly captures the ironic surprise of the most important event of our lives which we all know will happen but surprises us nonetheless.

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Capitalism by Ayn Rand

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I did not give this 4 stars because I agree with most of it or even half of it. I gave it 4 stars because I do think she did a good job of conveying her ideas, and the essays made me think about my views and examine whether they were based on faulty assumptions. Also, I found this book much easier and more entertaining than other Rand books I've read.

Here are just a few issues I had with Rand's ideas. She seems to willfully ignore basic economic concepts such as the tragedy of the commons. ToC is basically the worst world-wide threat right now. Global climate change invalidates so many of her arguments right off the bat. She ignores how money can generate more money without any innovation or hard work. Modern research in the irrationality of man also disproves many of her arguments. Her arguments against anti-trust laws can be effortlessly dismissed by anyone who has previously paid for cable or an internet connection. I think she terribly discounts the good that labor unions have done for working people. Now that labor unions have lost power in many industries I think we've all felt some of the negative effects both in the economy, politics and in loss of our leisure time, though we may not all associate it with that cause. And OMG did she honestly try to make an argument in favor of child labor? That's when you know that unfettered capitalism has really jumped the shark. As an aside, her attack on altruism is diametrically opposed to both Christianity and the current science of happiness.

There were also interesting parts that challenged me to think - and occasionally I even agree with some things. For example, I agree that many government subsidies are a horror. I have long had an intense dislike of the corn subsidy and its terrible results for both our economy and health. Nor am I a fan of train subsidies. Clearly, the price point for trains should be in between buses and airplanes? Yet trains often cost the same or more as a flight. I am also interested in Rand's argument about unemployment being related to government interference in the market. That seems plausible when government interference in immigration is considered, but I don't know enough about the research and numbers - and a fully mobile world labor market doesn't seem likely anytime soon. She appears to be mostly right about the hypocrisy of both political parties with regards to religion and reason.

Rand makes the argument that it's not true that too much of a good thing is always bad, and that's correct that it's not ALWAYS true. But it is sometimes true. (Even excessive water consumption can kill you.) I don't think she succeeded in proving that unfettered capitalism is better than capitalism with regulation.

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The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism by Ayn Rand
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Note: Objectivism is deeply anti-Christianity, and anti-religion in general. You should not trust a politician that claims that he is both a Christian and a believer in the philosophies of Ayn Rand. He does not understand either Christianity or Objectivism, or possibly both, or he's a huge liar.

That said, this book isn't really what it sounds like. It's a collection of essays by Ayn Rand and Nathanial Branden that are not pro-heathenism per se. Rand and Branden try to explain how the philosophy of objectivism is that individuals need to think through their own rational system of morals and ethics. That's a good start. The problem is that a lot of the points in Rand's essays are either not logically sound or based on incorrect premises. (And I was pretty bored by Branden's sycophantic essays.) It's like swimming through mud.

For one thing, Rand refers a great deal to biological examples, and she repeatedly gets biology wrong. Obviously, she's not a biological scientist, and we know more today about biology than in the 1960s, but she premises her ethics arguments on the natural world- and her basis is incorrect. She believes that living creatures are driven primarily by continuing to live- that life (and the avoidance of pain) is the fundamental value of the natural world. That's only sort of true. The natural world is more driven by reproduction which means that animals regularly act on behalf of other related animals. Even on a cellular level there's the theory now that mitochondria used to be a separate free-living organism that combined with other organisms (endosymbiosis theory). Her idea that humans are emotionally and ethically tabula rasa when they are born isn't scientifically supported either. These are just a few examples, she gets a number of her points about science and animals either factually wrong or logically wrong. It reminds me of the absurd co-opting of evolutionary principals for political "Social Darwinism" nonsense.

As for her logical failures, (though I'm sure that some American Republicans agree with her) she makes no rational distinction between armed robbery, confiscation of all your property in a communist system, and taxation. She makes no distinction between altruism generally and complete self-sacrifice. Her views on love collapse into such total nonsense that arguing against them would require an entire treatise. She also incorrectly predicted many of the results of capitalism so this makes her arguments for unhindered capitalism look obviously foolish.

I do appreciate her condemnation of people's failure to engage in the pursuit of knowledge and reason. I also enjoyed her condemnation of communism.

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